I started playing the free trial for FF14, the online one, recently. It's been a long long time since I've indulged in any kind of MMO. Really anesthetizes my brain with the endless loop of task->reward->new task->new, slightly better reward; onward and so forth. Even if the tasks are so easy and trivial as to be actually insulting, my brain appreciates being told what to do, and so obliges happily.
The illusion of doing things alongside other people doesn't hurt either in this lonely world I live in; though there doesn't seem to be much of anyone talking to anyone. The last MMO I played was oldschool Runescape more than a decade ago, and that had people yelling all the time, to everyone and noone; FF14 just seems to give people common meeting places, but no real reason to talk to eachother. Like real life, people having common meeting places like stores, but not actually interacting, just coincidentally being in eachother's proximity until the necessity of being in that location is satisfied. In the dungeon raids you can sign up for and where you're actually part of a team, still no communication of any kind. Everyone's role is rigidly defined, there's no question at all of what anyone should be doing, so you and everyone just do their role, idly marching from one group of mobs to the next in meticulous order, until you get to the boss, but he's basically just a bigger mob that takes longer to kill, and afterwards the loot RNG determines who gets rewarded, and then everyone departs wordlessly.
I did really like fishing atleast, it's the most honest about the skinner-box-reality that the MMO relies on. Literally just pushing a button to see what reward, if any, you get. Actually, it's even better than that, because you can get onto these big fishing boats, and it's a big skinner box party where everyone gets together to push buttons together (no need to communicate to eachother obviously) and if someone gets REALLY lucky with their button push, the whole boat goes into LSD psychedelic rainbow mode and everyone gets good button pushes for like two minutes. Let me tell you, these boats only take off once every two hours, and people crowd around the dock and fucking fight to get onto that boat; if you aren't there the moment the registration time opens, you're gonna get left behind because the boat fills up in 1-2 seconds. It's great, I maxed out fishing before anything else.
The real reason I started writing about FF14 was because I wanted to complain about how contemptibly mediocre the story and writing is, but I just started writing the previous few paragraphs without even thinking about it. You'd think in an MMO the story and dialogue would be the most superfluous portions of the games, meant only to pragmatically shuttle people from activity to activity, but JESUS does everyone have a lot to say. It's a pet peeve of mine for anything to be relentless explanatory and verbose, and just about every random bumfuck nobody NPC has 1-2 paragraphs of dialogue; and if they aren't a rando then buckle in for the waterboarding of exposition that's going to get dumped onto your face over and over until you're ready to tell them where you hid the bodies. There's merit in having a highly detailed fantasy world, I can dig it, but please, game, just please, Jesus, how long is this history lesson going to be? How many proper nouns can you fit into one conversation? Should I be taking notes? Just, goddamn, it's an assault on my patience and attention span, I can only take so much.
That isn't to say I'm having a wretched time with the game, whatever there is that isn't generic and uninspired just so happens to be copied shameless from previous FF's. Everything remotely likable is just stolen from Square Enix's glorious past and then freshened up with some new lipstuck and made to work the corner to see what fans are still willing to pay for a lightning unicorn that you can ride around. My most memorable moment so far was when I was being spoken to by an NPC, and out of the corner of my eye I see a player ride over a rustic wooden bridge in a goddamn Mercedes-Benz convertible, and he speeds off before I could mash through the multiple pages of monologue to get a closer look.
And that's my experience so far with FF14, the free trial's been a good waste of a few days. I don't think I'll go forward with the purchase of the game + subscription to get to enjoy all the crap that happens after level 35.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 13183404 times)